The Labour party’s in-growing toenail, Jeremy Corbyn, (not to be removed without much screaming and blood), behaved like a man on a zero-hours contract today. He skedaddled through his six questions as if dashing away to another gig at 12.30. But doing what? Perhaps auctioning off the ‘Remain’ badges he bought in June at ‘lastminute.com’. At least he’s stopped reciting bleaty letters from Momentum supporters posing as undecided voters. Instead he played the internal politics game. He welcomed the chancellor’s decision to abandon fiscal prudence and to commit Britain to bankruptcy until 2020 and beyond. Big spender Corbyn has always wanted to splash other people’s money around like a dictator’s wife at Jimmy Choos. And he singled out John McDonnell for praise, offering sincere congratulations to the shadow chancellor for arguing all his life that only failing governments resort to the madness of solvency. Rather a touching moment. The last embrace of two daft old chatter-boxes as the mini-bus arrives and the day-centre closes.
Street-fighter Cameron can’t see the point any more. He derives no pleasure from striking a barely conscious enemy. Every point he scores will accrue to his successor. He managed to fluff easy gags today. A lousy joke likening the Labour leadership to the ditherings of Eddie the Eagle went wrong. His line about the shadow cabinet’s ‘job creation scheme’ was better but short of dazzle. He’s like an actor who’s lost his motivation. His thoughts are drifting away from Westminster, to city directorships, the lecture circuit, chat-show sofas, the memoirs. But the hollowness of it all.
Behind him sat another crushed divinity, George Osborne, gaunt and moochy-faced, his stormy black hair angrily spiked. He looked almost comically sad. A crown prince awakening in the orphanage and realising it was all a dream. Osborne stared blankly around him, perhaps sketching out a proposal for a Portillo-esque travel series. Hot air balloons. Has that been done? A motor-bike with pillion-car? Hang on. That’s Corbyn’s gig.
Angus ‘Eid Mubarak’ Robertson made another thinly-disguised bid for the UN secretary-generalship. Post-Ramadan, he welcomed hungry Moslems back to the banqueting table whose benches he’s been keeping warm in their absence. ‘Eid Mubarak’ he cried. Cameron did the same. ‘Eid Mubarak!’ Don’t they realise how weird and sucky-up that sounds? Like an American declaring his fondness for ‘British ale’.
SNP member Alison Thewliss quoted a bevy of UN busybodies looking into Britain’s record on childcare and ‘cultural and social rights’ (whatever they are). These highly paid snoops have expressed ‘serious doubts’ about the ‘Tory government’s brutal welfare cuts’, she said. Ms Thewliss’s crafty phrasing left it unclear whether ‘Tory’ and ‘brutal’ were the words of the UN itself. Sounds like the poor blue-berets are being dragged into an internal row and exploited. Let’s hope the letters of protest are published soon.
Throughout the session every eye crept surreptitiously towards Teresa May. Her pinched and cautious features inscrutable, she was perched within knifing distance of the PM. She looked a bit like Wallis Simpson carved from volcanic rock. The joke in the tea-room is that she’s the only politician ever to have been canvassed for a blood donation by a reptile house. Her face, when she speaks, may be perfectly engaging but in repose those chill features resolve themselves into lines and shadows that suggest ‘a sneer of cold command’. Even her cheek-bones look intimidating. Those who believe she’ll thrive in power are probably right. But didn’t we have a female PM once who enjoyed it all too much?
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